Despite growing corporate disclosure of social impact, only 15% of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets with sufficient trend data are on track, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF). The findings highlight a persistent gap between recognising social challenges and mobilising the resources needed to address them.

Published on 8 October 2026, The Impact Economy: Turning Disclosure into Demand examines how measurable social outcomes can become economically actionable, moving impact beyond reporting requirements and the margins of corporate social responsibility. The report identifies what it describes as an “impact paradox”: greater visibility of social outcomes does not necessarily translate into the demand, investment or coordinated action required to achieve them. Healthcare serves as a test case for exploring how this gap can be addressed.

Four pathways to scale impact

The authors identify four pathways through which demand for social outcomes can be strengthened:

• Regulatory demand: public policies and regulatory frameworks that encourage or require outcomes to be prioritised.
• Commercial demand: business models that integrate measurable social value into products, services and market transactions.
• Financial demand: investment and financing mechanisms that connect capital to demonstrable outcomes.
• Collaborative demand: coordinated action among governments, corporations, investors, philanthropies, social innovators and intermediaries.

Together, these pathways point to a broader shift in how impact is incorporated into economic decision-making. Rather than treating social outcomes as a separate reporting exercise, the report calls for systems that connect them to incentives, purchasing decisions and financing at scale.

From measurement to economic value

For businesses and investors, the numbers raise a strategic question: how can the measurement and disclosure of social impact influence actual decisions about where resources are allocated? The distinction matters because reporting alone does not guarantee that effective solutions will attract customers, secure investment or achieve wider adoption. Turning evidence of impact into sustained demand requires mechanisms that connect outcomes to the incentives of the organisations capable of funding, delivering or scaling them.

The paper calls for coordinated action across the public and private sectors to make measurable social impact a more ordinary part of economic activity, rather than an isolated component of corporate responsibility. The central message is that the next stage of the impact economy depends not only on demonstrating what works, but also on creating the conditions for those solutions to be financed, adopted, and scaled.

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Source: World Economic Forum